What are the most popular graphic file format for games?

Guess the title says it all. I've been mainly using
Targa (32 bit - 24 color, 8 alpha) up to now and was
wondering if this was a good Mac/PC format, or if I should
jump ship to something else,

As an aside, does anyone know what the consoles (Xbox,
Sony, Nintento) and handhelds use? Curious as to whether
these are proprietary are not. I'd assume the Xbox might
be PC format based, but then again maybe not?

Yup, PNG and JPEG are the way to go. JPEG's are only for large images that don't need alpha. It seems we all pretty much agree that TGA is out in favor of PNG because it compresses better.

Some folks really like SuperPNG as a plug-in for PhotoShop. I haven't had as good of luck compressing with it as I have with Preview. Some say that Save for Web works great in Photoshop but I've also had problems there with images getting saved with strange halo artifacts once in a while. I tried GraphicConverter too and it doesn't do as well as Preview either. Preview is the best I've found for size and quality for converting to PNGs so far. Just some observations from my point of view.

Also, don't go the libpng route to read PNGs into your program, use something from one of the system frameworks like Quicktime or NSImage so that you don't have to worry about keeping your PNG loading code up to date.

Wow, talk about bleeding a turnip! pngcrush does indeed work as advertised. Thanks for the tip. Would there, by chance, possibly be a gui version? I dislike having to use command line utilities. Prolly wouldn't be too hard to hack a gui for it I guess, but I'm not feeling that ambitious right now.

PNG is great for images without alpha channel but I can't get SuperPNG to save the alpha channel. TIFF (good or bad) is what I use for alpha channel images. Suggestions for better alternatives are welcome since I'm not particularly fond of the TIFF format.

Or even better, is there a way to set up blending in OpenGL without the need for an alpha channel?

SuperPNG *is* PhotoShop. No need to use Graphic Converter. Preview works great for exporting tiffs to PNG even with alpha channel. It makes the smallest PNGs I've seen except for pngcrush (what a cool name). Just use export in Preview with a Tiff or a Photoshop file. If you insist on exporting PNGs from Photoshop you need to use transparency, not alpha channels. There is also a version of SuperPNG that saves the alpha channels in PNGs but don't do it that way because the files are always bigger.

It all depends on how you are distrubuting as well.
Quake and games of that sort tend to use TIFF and Targa because their distrubtion method compresses them for them rather than compressing them before hand, to avoid the overhead of double compression, which isn't much now a days.
But if you're just bundeling the images inside of the application then compress before hand, which i would tend to agree with Alex, and Keith. JPEG and PNG are the best formats.

AnotherJake Wrote:Preview works great for exporting tiffs to PNG even with alpha channel. It makes the smallest PNGs I've seen except for pngcrush (what a cool name). Just use export in Preview with a Tiff or a Photoshop file. If you insist on exporting PNGs from Photoshop you need to use transparency, not alpha channels. There is also a version of SuperPNG that saves the alpha channels in PNGs but don't do it that way because the files are always bigger.

Never thought about using Preview to convert and save images. I'll try and see what I get. It might just be the solution I'm looking for.